Emmy Season Isn't Even in Full Swing, but ‘Hacks' Has Already Emerged as Top Comedy Awards Contender
What a weekend. Just like 'Anora,' which has fully jumped back into the Best Picture race, the television show 'Hacks' also had an incredibly auspicious weekend, adding a PGA Award and DGA Award to join its Critics Choice Awards 2025 statue for Best Comedy Series.
Though other current reigning Emmy winners like 'Shōgun,' 'Baby Reindeer,' and 'Ripley' were big winners as well, those shows have either ended or are far off from a new season, so their PGA and/or DGA Award wins have little effect on the upcoming Emmys race. But 'Hacks' is expected to premiere its fourth season in the spring, most likely making it eligible for a possible back-to-back Outstanding Comedy Series win.
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At the DGA Awards 2025, 'Hacks' director and co-showrunner Lucia Aniello got emotional thanking the room full of peers for awarding her work directing the Season 3 finale 'Bulletproof.' 'I'm very proud to be a member of this union,' she said. 'I really believe in the strength of our union and unions across the country as a force right now, in this moment.'
She added, 'On our show, Deborah Vance is a famous comedian and her relationship with her audience is probably the most lasting relationship she has in her life. So for us, crowds are a huge character in our show and that is directed by the people behind me. They are incredible,' gesturing to her Unit Production Manager Chris R. Robinson, First Assistant Director Jeff Rosenberg, Second Assistant Director Erin Stern Linares, Second Second Assistant Director Alaina Neumann Rafdal, Additional Second Assistant Director Chalis Romero who share the award with Aniello.
The unifying sentiment goes along with her and her 'Hacks' co-creators acceptance speech at the Critics Choice Awards, calling for executives to bring production back to Los Angeles as a way to help the city recover from the devastating wildfires in January.
The past few years, the Comedy Series categories have see a tight race between 'Hacks,' 'The Bear,' 'Abbott Elementary,' and 'Ted Lasso' (which is reportedly being revived). Though 'The Bear' broke the record for most comedy Emmy wins in one night at the 2024 Emmys, 'Hacks' ultimately won Outstanding Comedy Series, with many crediting it being more humor forward as the reason it trumped the FX series.
'Hacks' winning again over 'The Bear' at the PGA Awards, and especially the DGAs, where the latter show had three nominations in the same category, shows that Emmy win was not a fluke. Even though there are new comedies in the mix like 'Nobody Wants This' or 'English Teacher,' that are being pegged for an Emmys run, the Max series that has earned star Jean Smart three Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series wins in a row is now locked in as the comedy to beat, should Season 4 maintain the same level of quality.
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'I never actually made tooth-to-Emmy-winner contact. I did not bite.' That's co-creator and actor Paul W. Downs denying — to the best of his recollection — ever clamping down on Emmy-winner Julianne Nicholson's hand while lunging to bite her during their 'frantic' scene in 'Hacks' Season 4. More from IndieWire The Creators of 'Hacks' Want To Know Which TV You Own The Cinematography of 'Hacks' Outdoes Itself in Season 4 Finale and Makes Deborah Vance the Queen of the World 'I think that's the only take where you pretended to [bite her], actually,' co-creator Lucia Aniello said. 'She would've been fine with it. She's so game, if Paul bit her hand, she would've gone with it. She would not have stopped the scene.' 'She was really holding onto that bag,' Downs said. 'She was very committed.' The scene in question, which you can see in the full video interview above, is from Episode 9, 'A Slippery Slope,' which was written by Downs, Aniello, and co-creator Jen Statsky. They were joined by cinematographer Adam Bricker and production designer Rob Tokarz, for a virtual panel discussion as part of Universal Studio Group's USG University. Let's break it down: Jimmy (Downs) and Kayla (Megan Stalter) are helping a sleepy, hungover Dance Mom (Nicholson) into her dressing room, where they have to revitalize the TikTok star so she can perform on Deborah's (Jean Smart) late-night show. The premise is simple enough. But it's the details — the performances and props, the lighting and the wallpaper, the cinematography and the blocking — that elevate a funny scene to hysterical heights. 'There were some nicks and cuts. There were some injuries,' Downs said. 'That was a very physical scene. She threw herself into a bar cart. There was blood.' That being said, production designer Rob Tokarz and his team helped to protect the actors as best they could. When Dance Mom first enters the room, yes, she stumbles into a bar cart, which looks and sounds dangerous enough to get a laugh — even though it was perfectly safe. 'We had to make sure the bar cart is something safe for her to bump into multiple times, so we had to replace all the glassware with something that was not going to break apart,' Tokarz said. 'I think we replaced the glass on the bar cart itself with tempered glass so if it were to crack it would be safe.' Another astute touch by Tokarz was making sure any prop used in the scene for comic effect would also be something that would logically be found in a late-night dressing room — like the big metal bucket first glimpsed when the characters enter, when it's filled with bottles of water, and later seen in close-up as Dance Mom's getting dunked. 'We had options on what the ice bucket would actually be and what would look best cinematically,' Tokarz said. 'Then we kind of back it up and have it make sense to the room. 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[…] There was the clearing of the cocaine, which is a very common phrase in film and theater.' Aniello, who also directed the episode, said they don't often get to 'do a lot of rehearsal — some might say none' — but they make the time for more physical scenes like this one. It helps maximize the humor already written into the scripts while identifying unforeseen avenues for additional wit. 'When we reveal she's on all fours, that's written into the script,' Aniello said. 'They wrestle over the bag, she runs into the bar cart, all those beats are definitely there. In terms of 'they're sitting down and this is where they stand up,' that's the kind of thing that we work out.' 'It's a delicate dance of being very direct in the script and then also when we rehearse so we can match continuity and stuff,' Statsky said. 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'Hacks' is now four seasons into an established comedy rhythm, even as it continues to find new ways to complicate the dynamic between standup legend Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and comedy writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder). But that certainly doesn't mean making the show has gotten easy or expected. Co-creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky have always been pretty visual writers, with a clear sense of what they want, but they search with the tirelessness of Damian's (Mark Indelicato) quest for coyote-warding bear piss to sculpt exactly the right comedy moments. So while they often aren't 'finding the show' in the edit in a wholesale way, they are searching every frame for what beat is the funniest. 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Aniello praised the show's 'very patient' editors, especially the assistant editors who create string outs but sometimes get asked to go back in and find moments that were between where the takes started and ended, or that weren't logged, or that were part of the pre-roll. Part of the instinct to do that comes from the very fact that 'Hacks' is a show about a standup comic. It is about performance, and while Downs is the only one of the three co-creators to appear on camera (so far), Aniello and Statsky are also performers, too. 'We all came from making alt comedy — performing it, writing it, shooting digital shorts and editing them ourselves. So we come at it from performance. We really want the performance to be just right, especially when it comes to comedic moments. We not only watch every take, we often audition them in the sequence,' Downs told IndieWire on the same Filmmaker Toolkit episode. 'If there's five takes, we'll watch all five takes in the sequence of the other actors to see what alchemy is correct.' Aniello pointed out that watching one take after another can rob them of the wider context of the scene. 'You actually don't know which is the best one until all of a sudden you see it in the sequence. So sometimes it can just be time-consuming and you've gotta finish the show at some point,' Aniello said. But one of the barriers to finally finishing the hat 'Hacks' episodes is crafting the final mix and color grade so that the show is presented in the best possible way across a wide variety of viewing platforms and formats. 'We sound mix on the stage and we listen to it on the stage, but then when we do our review of the sound mix after notes are given, we go to a different environment and listen to it on television speakers,' Downs said. 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The devil is in those details, to be sure, but some of the biggest shifts that happen in the edit on 'Hacks' are ones that simplify what we see in order to emotionally clarify what the characters are going through. One key example of this occurs early on in the Season 4 finale, 'Heaven,' while Deborah is licking her late-night exit wounds back in Las Vegas. 'When I come into a director's cut of Lucia's work, I know pretty much what it is because we write in a way that's pretty visual and we oftentimes have planned things that I'll expect to see,' Downs said. But the sequence of Deborah moping in bed, at rock bottom, was different. A case of extremely judicious editing, in addition to take selection, elevated it beyond what Downs expected to see. 'We had actually scripted [a series of] voicemails from Jimmy [Paul W. Downs] and Kayla [Megan Stalter] and Randy [Robbie Hoffman] and Ava just checking in on her and all of the calls that she'd missed. But when Jen and I came in at the producer's level to watch Lucia's first director's cut, she had opted not to include those voiceovers,' Downs said. 'And I was so moved by that sequence. I thought it was one of my favorite things in the series. Now, that's saying a lot because my lines were cut, OK? Jimmy's lines were cut. But I loved that sequence so much.' All episodes of 'Hacks' are now streaming on Max. To hear full interview, subscribe to the on , , or your favorite podcast platform. Best of IndieWire The Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in June, from 'Vertigo' and 'Rear Window' to 'Emily the Criminal' All 12 Wes Anderson Movies, Ranked, from 'Bottle Rocket' to 'The Phoenician Scheme' Nightmare Film Shoots: The 38 Most Grueling Films Ever Made, from 'Deliverance' to 'The Wages of Fear'
